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Love and Hate

LOVE AND HATE ARE THESIS AND ANTITHESIS

Every growth, growth as such, is dialectical. It needs thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; synthesis again in its turn becomes thesis, and creates antithesis and synthesis — which again, in its turn, becomes thesis.

That’s the way the whole existence works. That’s why you find duality everywhere. The duality is thesis and antithesis. One can remain caught between the two, divided, split; there will be no growth. One can make a bridge between the two, and create a new phenomenon: that is synthesis. One can remain at the synthesis; then growth stops there, unless this synthesis again functions as a thesis to produce antithesis, and so on.

For example, you have love and hate. Love is the thesis, hate is the antithesis; and most people die caught in the struggle, conflict, between the two. They are never able to see that there is a subtle connection between love and hate; that they are not two energies but one energy having two polarities. They are just like the negative and positive in electricity — but it is electricity all the same.

Hate is also a kind of love standing upside down. It happens that you can forget your friend, but you cannot forget your enemy. The enemy haunts you more than the friend. You think more of destroying the enemy than helping the friend. The reason is that love is a thesis — simple. Hate is an antithesis — it has become more complicated. It has become negation, and negativity has an attraction — for many reasons.

One is afraid of negativity because you cannot hate someone without creating a wound within yourself. Nobody pretends hate. It is always authentic, because why should one pretend hate? — It hurts.

People pretend love; they may not be really in love, but the very idea that they are in love is soothing. So love can remain superficial; but hate always goes deep — it cannot remain superficial. That’s why one becomes more concerned about the enemy than about friends.

The man who is working for enlightenment has to find a bridge between the dualities, because without finding the bridge he cannot transcend them, he cannot go above them. And the bridge is there — it has only to be discovered. One has to see how love becomes hate, how hate becomes love — that they are capable of transforming into each other. Naturally, they cannot be different energies; just different situations, states, of the same energy.

As you become aware that love and hate are the same energy, then you are not to be concerned with love and hate, because those are only two poles; you have to be more concerned with the energy of which they are the poles: what is that energy? Watching it, you start a new force within yourself which is synthesis.

You come to a point when you know love and hate are one.

This is a great synthesis — the dualism is finished. But with the finishing of dualism your life comes to a static point. You have grown above love and hate, and there will be a kind of compassion — that will be the synthesis. You don’t hate, you don’t love, but you have a certain compassion for both friends and enemies. But compassion again becomes a simple thing.
That’s why the synthesis always turns into a thesis — another beginning. And compassion must have some duality which you can become aware of only when you have achieved compassion.
What is the antithesis of compassion? It is indifference, upekchha. That’s the word Buddha has used. It carries more meaning than “indifference.” It is a kind of no interest, neither this way nor that way… as if the person does not exist at all for you. Compassion will bring you to indifference.

And all these stages you can find in the growth of different people at the point where they got stuck. For example, the Jaina monks are stuck with indifference. That becomes renunciation, not being bothered with the world.

The Hindu has also become stuck with that, thinking that the world is only a dream; it doesn’t matter, you need not be concerned about it. They have grown a little; but at the point of indifference they will start shrinking, they are stuck again. They have to find something between compassion and indifference — the bridge.

There is a bridge, there is always a bridge in every duality, unless you come to a point which has no duality.

That point is the point of enlightenment.

It has no antithesis, so you cannot even call it thesis; and it is not a synthesis. It has dropped all three — the whole triangle. It is something beyond the triangle of evolution. And the beauty is, because it is not part of a triangle, you are not stuck. And from that point growth changes its nature completely: it is no longer dialectical.
Before enlightenment, growth is dialectical: always divided, always finding something which joins it and then again another division and another division. But a point comes — for example between compassion and indifference, the synthesis is equilibrium. The Buddhist word for it is samata.

You are equally balanced, you are neither indifferent nor compassionate, neither leaning to this side nor to that side. Samata can become a point from where the change, the radical change happens in the process of evolution.

Below samata everything is dialectical. You cannot love without hating; they will both go together. One will be conscious, the other will be unconscious; but they are one thing. That’s why you can turn them easily: a small incident, and love becomes hate. The person you were going to die for, you can kill him! Lovers have killed the same person for whom they would have sacrificed themselves. It is the same energy, but it has turned completely upside down.

Samata, equilibrium, has been immensely praised by Gautam Buddha. It simply means absence of any preference — neither this nor that. You are simply so much in the middle, so absolutely in the middle, that you are almost out of the duality — samata — because you have withdrawn your energy from both sides, you are not throwing your energy on any duality.

The whole energy becomes concentrated. In that concentration of your total energy is the possibility of explosion. The small point exactly in the middle cannot contain that much energy, which was spread all over a line divided into many sections, over the whole spectrum. It is almost like an atomic explosion. But it is the atomic explosion in consciousness.

The atom is not material, but a living entity. A living explosion of your energies becomes almost like a lotus flower. The shape of the explosion seen by the enlightened person is very similar to the shape of the lotus flower. It is because of this that the lotus flower has become symbolic of enlightenment.

From this point things are totally different. There is growth — growth never stops — but we cannot call it growth because that may create confusion. Before, it was dualistic; now it is non-dualistic. Before, there was constant conflict; now there is no conflict — it simply goes on growing.

Hence there is absolute silence and great blissfulness, because for the first time you are free of the torture of being caught in two opposing polarities. There is no tension, everything is relaxed, everything is at ease. Rather than calling it growth, it is a let-go.

Now the flow of your life becomes a relaxed phenomenon.

There is no end to evolution. Enlightenment is the end of dualistic growth, but the beginning of a non-dual evolution… a peaceful, silent movement of energy which goes on becoming bigger and bigger and goes on losing its separateness from universal energy. It always remains individual, even though it is spread all over the universe.

That feeling cannot be expressed by “I” because “I” is just another way of saying “ego.” Before enlightenment there was ego; ego can exist only in conflict. This state can be spoken of only as “am”-ness, without any “I.” It is a very strange feeling: you are not, and yet you are. You are not your old self; you are no longer a self, but you have not lost the feeling of am-ness.
So the question of what happens to individuals when they dissolve into the universal…. They still remain individuals, but with no assertion of “I” in them…just a silent song of am-ness or isness.

It is as if we put hundreds of candles in this room; all their light will become one. You cannot differentiate in the light — which part belongs to which candle — it has become a universal phenomenon. But still, each candle has its own flame, it has a certain individuality. The individuality has not disappeared, but it is very quiet and very silent and very nonassertive. It is almost as if it is nothing, but it is still there.

And that is one of the greatest mysteries: to feel yourself at one with the whole existence and yet know your inner flame… part of the whole, and yet not just a part — you are also a whole.
The Upanishads have a statement: “From the perfect comes the perfect. Yet the perfect left behind still remains as perfect as before” — nothing is taken away from it. The perfect dissolves into the perfect, but it is not that two perfections become a bigger perfection; it is the same perfection. The emphasis is that it is not a question of quantity, it is a question only of quality.
For example, one hundred candles burning in this room will not make the light heavier; it will be lighter. The change will be qualitative but it will not be quantitative. Each candle will be spread all over the room, and there is going to be no conflict in one hundred candles spreading all over the same space because these are not material bodies.

Just as light…consciousness is even more a quality. Light perhaps has some quantity in it. I think the scientists say that when there is sunlight over five square miles, the light has a little weight, but very small. I don’t know what will be the equivalent of five tolas…Sixty grams.Sixty grams. But on five square miles, if we can collect that light, concentrate that light, it moves the weighing scale to sixty grams. So although it seems just non-quantitative, it has a little quantity in it.

But consciousness has no quantity — five miles or five thousand miles or five million miles, it makes no difference. Awareness has no weight. So infinite awarenesses can exist in the same space without coming into any conflict. And the universe is infinite, so the growth never stops.

But we should remember that it is not the old growth; it is absolutely a new phenomenon. It is as if the first growth was something similar to sexual reproduction: two energies, male and female, negative and positive, thesis and antitheses, creating the birth of a child — the synthesis.

But the second part, after enlightenment, is nonsexual. Your consciousness just goes on expanding; it does not give birth to any child.

That’s why I have always condemned Jesus’ idea of the only begotten son of God. If God is the ultimate consciousness or equivalent to it, there is no possibility of any birth of a child. And if you accept the birth of a child then the Christian trinity is not right; there has to be a woman as an antithesis to the man.

They have avoided the woman just to discredit her, just not to put her on such a high pedestal as to be part of God; otherwise she becomes divine. But they have forgotten that the child is possible only through duality.

If God is alone, or the ultimate consciousness is alone — which is a far better and more evolved terminology…. Jainism uses, for the ultimate state of consciousness, kaivalya. It means aloneness. The word “God” is very primitive and childish — but pure aloneness…and it goes on growing. Its bliss, its joy, its ecstasy goes on growing, knows no limit.
But before it can happen you have to pass through a process of dialectics, because where we are, we are under the law of dialectics. To get free from dialectics is one of the major projects of spiritual evolution.

But it is very easily possible if one works through meditation, because that is the only way to find out the golden mean, the middle point which is transcendence. Buddha even called his whole way “the middle way,” because it is always to find exactly the middle point.

The moment you have found the middle point between love and hate, you are beyond both: you have entered into a new area, unexplored. But don’t stop until you find something which has no duality to it. Go on and on, searching after each duality for the one point which has no polarity to it; because that is the point between the two growths — prior to enlightenment and after enlightenment.